It has been wet, and is now fine again, consequently our view of the
downs exhibits those tones of vinous purple, shading into indigo, that
in moments of patriotic expansion I am apt to call Irish. I do not think
it is quite friendly of our neighbours, especially those who live upon
the ridge above our heads, to smile so significantly whenever that word
“view” happens to slip out, as it did just now, in alluding to our new
possession, and its prospects. For what, after all, is a view? The
question seems to suggest a reference to the dictionary, and here is
Webster, ponderous in brown calf. “View. 1st. Act of seeing, or
beholding; sight; survey; examination by the eye. 2nd. That which is
looked towards, or kept in sight; an appearance; a show.” Well, have we
not something to look towards, to keep in sight, some appearance, some
show? For that matter, so, it may be urged, has the habitant of the “two
pair back,” or the rustic whose prospect is limited to a survey of his
or her neighbours’ under garments,--those “short and simple flannels of
the poor” hung to dry in silhouette against a back fence. The truth is
it is not at all desirable to be so haughty. I will not go so far as to
say that it is unchristian, but it is certainly unbecoming, for are we
not all fellow-creatures? What if you _can_ command seven counties from
your windows? What if on one particular morning--to me incredible--you
did see three ships cross Shoreham gap? What if from your garden chair
you can be regaled by a fantasia of changing lights and shadows? be
lapped into peace upon summer afternoons, or stirred by the drama of
battle clouds, flung into blackness by a storm? Well, if you can, be
glad of it, but for pity’s sake abstain from bragging! “Gi’ God thanks,
and say no more o’ it.” Believe me it is not even commonly lucky to be
so proud, and I speak with some little authority upon that subject.
For as regards this matter of views, I too have been haughty to the
point of insupportableness. I too have believed that the possession of
wide prospects argued some peculiar, some ineffable superiority in
myself. There was a time when nothing short of an entire ocean, none of
your petty babbling channels, but the whole thundering Atlantic,
sufficed for my ambition. In those days only upon the largest
combination of sea, sky, mountain; sea-scape, land-scape, cloud-scape,
did it seem possible adequately to exist. As for a mere rustic
landscape, as for a confined one, as for a humdrum English one, above
all as for a landscape within fifty miles of London, why the mention of
such things merely moved my commiseration! Those were the days when to
be called upon to leave what is sometimes uncivilly called the ruder
island, and to repair, even temporarily, to the more prosperous one,
seemed a fall and a degradation hardly to be measured by words. When the
contraction of the horizon seemed like a contraction of all life, and of
all that made life worth having. When the remembrance that one would
have to wake in the morning with no dim blue line to greet one,
appeared, to a patriotic, a self-respecting being, to be a wrong and an
indignity hardly to be endured without revolt.
Such an attitude is, I now hold, unbecoming in mere mortals, and, like
other vaulting ambitions, is apt to precede a fall. The man who starts
in life determined to be either Cæsar, or nothing, frequently fails to
become Cæsar, whereas with regard to the other alternative, the gods are
quite capable of taking him at his word. Happily, life is for most of us
a liberal education, and the narrowing of the horizon comes to be
endured with a philosophy born of other, and more serious deprivations.
It may even be open to question whether any man or woman ever yet was
made the better by the possession of a noble view?
That he or she ought to have been made so is quite true, but as a matter
of fact, have they? We are moulded out of exceedingly stubborn stuff,
and are not often ennobled, I suspect, by the landscapes that surround
us, any more than we are by the pursuits we follow, or the names that we
carry about with us. Furthermore the essentials of all landscape show a
considerable similarity. Much the same sort of clouds and sunshine, much
the same sort of nights and days, much the same sort of summers and
winters, visit alike the tamest and the wildest of them. Even the more
dramatic and exciting fluctuations--snow, and hail, storm, and
lightning--exhibit a greater impartiality than might have been expected.
The gale that has just unroofed your lordly tower, has equally swept the
tiles off our humble porch; in the same way that moralists are fond of
assuring us that sickness and sorrow, loss and pain, old age and death,
fall equally upon the homes of beggars and of kings.
Never having belonged to the last of these classes, I cannot take it
upon me to answer for the discomforts that pertain to it. With regard to
the other, though I have often seen myself figuring, or upon the point
of figuring, amongst its sad and tattered ranks, the impression has
never been a particularly agreeable one, and I prefer, therefore, not to
dwell upon it. It was moreover the subject of landscapes, I think, not
of either kings or beggars, that was under discussion? But that is the
sort of thing that is always happening! Of all the unsatisfactory stock
to keep, ideas are in my experience the most unsatisfactory; equally
whether they are winged, or entirely wingless ones. As for a
diary--which, to be of the slightest use, ought to act as a kind of
crow-boy, or goose-girl, to them, and keep them in order--on the
contrary it seems merely to follow their waddlings and gyrations with
the most foolish, and unnecessary submissiveness. The result is that one
starts intending to fill a page with one subject, and before one has got
very far one discovers that in reality one is filling it up with quite
another!